Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers. His best-known compositions include 9 symphonies, 5 piano concertos, 1 violin concerto, 32 piano sonatas, 16 string quartets, his great Mass the Missa solemnis, and one opera, Fidelio…

Charles Munch's isn't the most subtle Beethoven around, but it certainly is exciting, and that counts for a lot. In particular, this Ninth has what has to be one of the angriest, most fiery first movements ever recorded. It's worth hearing for that alone, but there are other attractions as well, including a perfectly paced Adagio, and a very well-sung finale with some stellar names among the soloists…

With his very own “mysterious seductive power and legendary elegance” (Le Monde), Claudio Abbado opened for the last time the LUCERNE FESTIVAL in the summer of 2013. Only a few months later, the world had to bid farewell to a monumental artist, humanist, great conductor and orchestra founder. Even in the concert itself, documented here, lived a moment of farewell, as the three great works performed tell of the transience of life. The centerpiece of the Eroica is the funeral march revealing “abysses of shattering dimension” - an “intense experience” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung). This record, the last audio-visual documentation of his work, captures once again the extraordinary atmosphere of “vibrant emotionality” that always emerged when Abbado created music with his “orchestra of friends”.

On the eve of his centenary in 2018, Sony Classical releases the most important collection, Leonard Bernstein’s classic American Columbia recordings, remastered from their original 2- and multi-track analogue tapes. This has allowed for the creation of a natural balance (for example, between the orchestra and solo instruments) that brings the quality of these half-century-old recordings, excellent for their time, up to the standards of today’s audiophiles. In addition, there has been a meticulous restoration of some earlier masterings in which LP surface noise was too rigorously eliminated at the expense of the original brilliance.

Beethoven’s Fifth, described by one writer as "the most powerful work of musical rhetoric in orchestral literature," is surely the best-known symphony ever written. But how well do you really know this masterpiece? There are so many novel, forward-looking elements in it that it took years for some people to accept it as anything but unintelligible modern music.

Beethoven took a massive stride forward in the development of the symphonic form with the 'Eroica'. Not only is the work written on an unprecedented scale, it also lays the very foundations of Romanticism in music.The symphony mirrors Beethoven's own emergence from despair and he used it to symbolize mankind's capacity for greatness. He initially dedicated the score to Napoleon whom embodied his view of greatness. However, when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, Beethoven furiously removed the dedication from the score.